Kinder Morgan: Trouble in the Pipelines?

With a yield of 6.9%, Kinder Morgan's MLP is an investor favorite. But with growth slowing, it could lose appeal.

The $500 billion master-limited-partnership sector is the sausage maker of the investment world. Buyers love the yields -- now averaging about 6% -- but many know little about how the yields are generated. And Kinder Morgan, the country's largest energy-infrastructure company, may be the biggest sausage maker of them all. The publicly traded companies in the Kinder Morgan family own or operate 80,000 miles of pipelines carrying natural gas and petroleum products, and 180 terminals that store oil and other commodities. The company...